


This Time I'm Coming Down

by telm_393



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Character Study, Dancing, Drug Abuse, Gen, Intoxication, Near Death Experiences, Original Character Death(s), Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-07 03:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16400384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Jason makes a lot of decisions he might regret.





	This Time I'm Coming Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlingargents](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/gifts).



> I was super excited to get this assignment, and I hope you like it, recip! It got away from me a little. 
> 
> Title is from "The Drugs Don't Work" by The Verve, because if you're gonna go sad you might as well go Full Sad. 
> 
> There's also a lot of what I think could be termed suicidal thoughts here, and what could quite possibly be interpreted as a suicide attempt, but I think they’re vague enough that I figured I shouldn’t tag them. There is a serious sense of foreshortened future, though.
> 
> The original character death in the tags is a grandparent and from a long illness.
> 
> Spoilers up to and including “The Ballad of Donkey Doug”.

Jason’s grandpa has trouble breathing. Sometimes he has so much trouble that he gasps for air like he’s drowning and coughs so hard he gags. It gets so bad that Donkey Doug brings him a mask like the kind firefighters put on people who breathe in too much smoke, even though Donkey Doug hates Jason’s grandpa.

The mask is attached to a big silver tank, and the silver tank is full of medicine that makes grandpa stop shaking and choking and heaving. It makes him breathe deeper and slower, and he always looks relieved when he finally catches his breath, even kinda blissed out.

Jason learns after a while that the medicine in the tank is really just oxygen, and oxygen is just the air people breathe, except what’s in the tank is special, that’s why his grandpa needs to breathe it sometimes instead of normal air like everyone else, because, Jason’s mom says when he asks, sometimes her daddy needs more oxygen than what’s in the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is everything around Jason, it’s the humidity sticky in his hair and the smoke from joints and cigarettes on his tongue and the way everything feels sharp when it’s cold. The atmosphere is all the things that hurt when he breathes and all the things that make him feel dirty and all the things that make him feel happy and all the things that make him feel alive.

His grandpa has a mask that makes that all go away. 

 **+**  

Jason’s grandpa dies. His mom cries a lot. Jason cries too, because grandpa’s been sick most of his life, but he’s always been there, which means something, and maybe a lot.

Jason thinks that maybe now that grandpa’s gone Donkey Doug will be around more, but he just leaves because it’s _all kinda depressing, y’know?_ and Jason’s mom says she doesn’t know why she’s surprised.

The bed his mom’s crew got for Jason’s grandpa from the hospital still takes up most of the living room, and the wheelchair her best bro Big Flamingo stole from his job at the Ft. Lauderdale airport is folded up against the kitchen wall, and the oxygen tank lives in the corner of Jason’s room because his mom put it there and Jason didn’t ask why, he still hasn’t asked why. His mom won’t answer his questions anyway.

His grandpa went through a few oxygen tanks—Jason doesn’t know where Donkey Doug got them from, but it doesn’t really matter, because sometimes you don’t have something and then you do and you don’t ask where it came from and if you know you definitely don’t tell—but Jason doesn’t know if he finished the last one. He’s not sure how it works, using up air like emptying out a bottle of pills.

Jason looks at the tank sometimes, and it says _95% oxygen._ Jason wonders what _100% oxygen_ would mean. He wonders what the numbers are on the oxygen he’s breathing now.

He wonders if, when his grandpa breathed in and out, his oxygen went back into the tank. Maybe it did, maybe that’s how it works, you breathe in and out and eventually all the medicine-oxygen gets replaced with the sick-oxygen and that’s when the tank stops working.

Maybe if Jason breathes what’s left of the oxygen there he’ll be able to breathe in some of his grandpa. Maybe what he breathes in will be enough to let him know how to make his mom happy again, because his grandpa always made her happy, she always called him her rock, and rocks are good when they’re people.

It’s hard to stop thinking about the tank when it’s right there, which must be why, when one night Jason wakes up feeling all shaky, he looks at the tank and thinks that maybe if he just—

So Jason Mendoza, eleven years old and counting, crawls over to the oxygen tank and holds the mask to his face with one hand and uses the other one to fumble with the little knob that turns it on, and then he takes a very deep breath.

He feels sick, but he felt sick when he woke up too, lately he’s been thinking a lot about how he feels sick all the time, the atmosphere wrapping around his chest and winding its way down his throat and choking him with how quiet it’s gotten at home without his mom having anyone to talk to and Donkey Doug what his grandpa would call AWOL, choking him with all the things he misses, all the confused feelings he has, and he’s breathing in and in and in and he feels funny, like his head is going to pop right off his shoulders and float away, like there are fireworks in front of his eyes.

When he wakes up he’s in a hospital bed, and the hospital bed’s actually in a hospital, and his mom is crying and running her fingers through her hair over and over again and asking him _why_ and so’s everybody else.

The nurses and the doctor and the other doctor that his mom yells at and the lady from CPS, they’re all asking the same question and Jason keeps not having the right answer.

The doctor shines a light in his eyes and asks him why, and Jason says, “It was there and I was there.”

That’s true.

The other doctor with the very nice smile and tired eyes sits next to his bed and asks him why and Jason says, “I don’t remember.”

That’s even truer, that’s as true as it gets. He doesn’t have the answer any more than he has the answer to most of the times tables or who Aesop’s Fables was, doesn’t have any words to say _I just want the bad things in the atmosphere to go away._

The lady from CPS says she’ll come visit Jason’s house in a few days (but she never does) and the doctors tell Jason’s mom Jason should “talk to someone” and his mom yells at him in the car on the way home while he watches the palm trees blow in the wind and the sun start setting pink and gold, yells at him about all the money they don’t have and why he’s so goddamn stupid and why her dad had to die and leave her with her stupid fucking husband and this stupid fucking kid—no, that came out wrong, God, baby, she’s so sorry, she’s just so _sad,_ mama’s just so sad right now…

Jason says, “It’s okay.”

She says, “Nothing’s okay.”

He can’t think of anything to tell her after that. He doesn’t want to think at all anymore.

She sells her bed (it’s Donkey Doug’s bed too, when he’s around) and Jason’s bed to pay for the hospital visit, but it’s no big deal. She’s already been sleeping in his grandpa’s hospital bed, and Jason can sleep on the couch, and on the floor when Donkey Doug gets back. Jason doesn’t sleep on the couch at all, in the end, even when Donkey Doug isn’t there, instead he sleeps on a pile of blankets and clothes in his room, because when he curls up like a cat he can pretend he actually is a cat and only worry about cat things like what kind of mouse he’s going to play with next.

He has bad dreams sometimes, but it’s okay. He wakes up and he knows they’re just dreams, they’re no big deal, and he wishes the rest of the world could be like that too, that he could tell himself it’s okay, the bad things don’t count because they’re just bad dreams, they don’t have to hurt because they’re not real, he doesn’t have to think about it…

He knows it doesn’t make sense, but he starts telling himself that anyway, because it’s easier to be happy when he knows that the bad stuff is just a nightmare, and it also means that if the bad dreams he has about his grandpa dying are real, then he can have good dreams about doing something awesome somewhere far away like Tampa one day, and those can be real too.

+

When Jason’s twelve one of the older boys at school teaches him how to do whip-its. Jason’s kind of not sure about them at first because the ones Vance gives him are shiny silver and look like little oxygen tanks and the last time he used an oxygen tank he got sick, but Vance says they’re not oxygen tanks, what the fuck, and Jason says, “So there’s different oxygen in them? Like, in the adam…atomsphere…at-mo-sphere inside them? Not 95%? How much percent is there?”

Vance just laughs the way people laugh when they’re never gonna explain why they’re laughing and says, “Try it, buddy. You don’t wanna think anymore? These’ll help, you’ll love them.”

Jason does, because they work. They make all the shaking things inside of him calm down, they make every feeling he doesn’t like stop choking him, they make his thoughts stop tripping all over each other. They make him smooth out and stop caring about how smart he isn’t. They make him relax.

They make him feel blissed out like his grandpa looked when his oxygen helped him finally breathe again. They mostly make him forget his grandpa too, how sick he always looked, how at the end he always called Jason _Tara_ and Jason’s mom _who are you._

Even when Jason starts doing other stuff, pills and the pot Donkey Doug gives him, whip-its are still his favorite because they give him the cleanest high he knows, and the healthiest, probably. They must be 100% oxygen.

+

Jason takes what he wants—steals, if you wanna be legal about it—because his mom works a lot but keeps losing her jobs, maybe because of all the pills she’s been taking, and Donkey Doug ends up in jail for like five years, and even when they don’t have money it doesn’t mean they don’t need money.

(Jason makes money off of selling fake drugs with Pillboi eventually, mostly because people keep selling _them_ fake drugs and it seems like a good idea to capitulate on, but that’s later.)

Jason takes what he needs, and sometimes he gets caught. And then he keeps getting caught, but it’s fine, because it’s still only sometimes, and nothing ever happens. Going to jail for a while isn’t that bad, the food is okay and sometimes Jason gets some time with Donkey Doug. Mostly he just gets parole officers, a long string of them, and some of them are jerks and some of them aren’t and that’s how it is. Jason dreams his way through most of the legal shit, and when he wakes up he’s back where he started.

“You can’t keep going how you’re going,” one of the judges tells him when he’s sixteen. His mom’s not in the courtroom. Neither is Donkey Doug, even though he’s not in jail right now and court seems like the kind of thing a dad should do with his kid, but Donkey Doug always just laughs when Jason reminds him that he’s his son, so maybe not.

Jason says, “Okay. I’ll go somewhere else.”

The judge asks him where.

Jason doesn’t have an answer, but while he’s in jail he tries to figure it out. To go somewhere else, he has to be able to do something that’ll mean anything outside of where he is now.

He chooses music.

+

Jason loves music, loves the way that EDM pounds in his head and fills him with electricity, and he’s a good dancer. He figures he was born with it, because even when his hands start tingling all the time his feet still move right, and Donkey Doug’s a really good pop n’ locker and his mom used to dance too, his grandpa told him over and over again like he didn’t know.

He never saw them dance together in person even though Donkey Doug tells him it’s how they met, but he has video his grandpa took, and he watches it over and over again until the VHS stops working because he wants to see what his mom and Donkey Doug were like before they were his mom and dad, and because he can hear his grandpa laughing in the background and saying, _That’s my girl!_

(When Jason was Jason to him, his grandpa would say, _That’s my boy_.)

Jason learned to dance mostly from watching people dance in the street and the music videos on MTV, and then he started putting different movements together in his head like puzzle pieces to make something new. Jason collects a whole dance crew to make those new things real. He shows them how the pictures in his head say they should move, how the music videos that paint their way across his skull shift and spin, and they learn step by step until he sees the routines in his head in the studio.

“You could actually do something with your talent,” his favorite parole officer, Officer Tracey, tells him, and Jason nods because he knows that.

If he ever goes somewhere else, he’ll probably dance there.

But also he probably won’t make it somewhere else. It’s one of those things he figures out as he grows up, like—yeah, he wants to leave Jacksonville, and it’s not because he doesn’t love it, it’s because he thinks there’s probably more music for him outside of the trailer park where he’s growing up and where he’s probably gonna die, but all he ever does is shit that he knows is just gonna make it harder to leave Jacksonville, and that makes sense. If he makes it harder to leave, he doesn’t have to go out there and fail (like everyone else, like his mom, who cries about how she’s a failure all the time while Jason just tries to get her to go to sleep). 

Jason says he’s _pre-successful,_ because one day he’s going to die, and he doesn’t want to die a failure, so he’s gonna die before he can get out of Jacksonville and succeed. That makes sense.

That seems better than nothing.

Jason can accept that he’s gonna die someday, and he can accept that he’s gonna die without his good dreams coming true as long as he can pretend that his dreams _could_ come true.

One of the prison psychologists tells him he’s a grade-A magical thinker, and that seems right. He can never figure out how magic tricks work, and he can never figure out how his brain works either, and he doesn’t really care either way. He’s fine with the mystery.

+

“Maybe one of these days you’ll have a wake-up call,” Officer Tracey says, rolling his eyes to the sky after Jason tells him that he hasn’t done anything to break his parole because whip-its don’t show up on drug tests. “You know you can’t keep like this forever.”

Jason doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that because, “Forever’s not that long.”

(Forever is as long as you’ve got, and Jason isn’t sure how much forever he even wants. The only person he knew who got lots of forever, like fifty years of forever, is his grandpa, and at the end his grandpa couldn’t even breathe.)

“Well, it sure ain’t long when you’re on a fast track to killing yourself, kiddo,” Officer Tracey says, something in his voice like every word he says is a sigh.

Jason’s not going to kill himself. That’s not the plan. He doesn’t say anything about the plan, because he’s forgotten what it is. Instead he says, “I read that a bunch of, like, super important people died when they were twenty-seven. There’s a club!”

Officer Tracey gives Jason a squinty look. “…The 27 Club, I am aware. Why?”

“So that’s where forever can end for me,” Jason decides. “Twenty-seven.”

“Jesus, Jason,” Officer Tracey mutters. “Look, if you stop saying that creepy shit I’ll buy you a milkshake, deal?”

Jason grins. “Okay!”

He gets a chocolate milkshake. He forgets to ask for no whipped cream, but that’s okay. He just scrapes it off.

+

Then Jason’s actually twenty-seven, and things change for him.

They day he almost dies he stumbles home and ends up lying down on the hospital bed that’s still in his living room even though his mom told him to sell it after she had to leave. He sold the couch instead. He’s keeping the bed and the TV. Donkey Doug will probably want it once he’s out of jail again in a few days. Jason wonders what Donkey Doug would’ve done if Jason had died. He wonders if Donkey Doug would’ve gone to the funeral, and then wishes he hadn’t wondered that.

The covers Jason’s lying on used to be white, but they aren’t anymore, and they’re heavy with humidity. He just feels heavy.

He stares up at the ceiling. There’s mold on it, and mold ground into the carpet too. It’s been raining really hard lately. Jason doesn’t know how to get rid of the mold, so he just uses whip-its to clean out his lungs, except they didn’t work this time and he doesn’t know if they’ll ever work again.

There’s sweat soaking through his clothes and making his hair stick to his face, and he feels gross, he hasn’t felt this gross since last time he woke up after getting blackout drunk and he was on the abandoned pier close to his house, smeared with mud and blood and with all his clothes on except his tank top.

It was a dream, one of those nightmares like the one where he and his mom robbed Palm Tree Pet Store and got caught, but he still didn’t like the feeling of all that sticky stuff on his body, and he showered until the hot water was cold, which happened pretty fast. His shower’s kinda shitty.

That was like a month ago. He was twenty-seven then, and he’s twenty-seven now.

_The 27 Club, I am aware. Why?_

_So that’s where forever can end for me. Twenty-seven._

“We’re not doing this no more,” he told Pillboi, and in that exact moment he changed his mind, because when he was in the safe he thought _I’m only twenty-seven._

Only twenty-seven, too young to die. He knows better than he did when he was seventeen, when ten years seemed like a really long time. He hasn’t done much of anything important in those ten years, so maybe it wasn’t long enough.

Just because Jason knows lots of dead people who never turned thirty doesn’t mean he has to be one of those dead people, doesn’t mean he deserves that. He’s always talking about what he deserves, and he still doesn’t know if he knows what he means by it. Maybe he should think about that.

Maybe he should just think more, because thinking is so fucking hard that he’s just kind of done everything to not think, and he doesn’t remember why. He doesn’t remember much, and maybe part of it is he doesn’t want to, but probably another part of it is he just can’t. He’s never had a good memory—even Donkey Doug has a better memory than him, and Jason’s seen him snort printer toner like twice—but he doesn’t need to have a good memory.

It’s fine to not have a good memory, and probably even the best thing for him, because he doesn’t want to remember lots of things, like how most of the nightmares he’s had actually happened, but now he thinks it’s time to want to remember things. It’s time to start winning.

He doesn’t want to die this year, and he doesn’t want to die not having done anything but some stuff that doesn’t sound as cool as it should when he says it out loud. He clutches the flyer for the dance competition close to his chest, which crumples it up, but later he smooths it out on the kitchen table, memorizes every word, every purple diamond in the design, and thinks that Dance Dance Resolution is going to win.

They’re good enough.

They deserve it. He deserves it. Or he’s going to deserve it.

He almost died. He’s twenty-seven and he almost died, and when he thinks about it he almost died when he was eleven too, and then a few times after that, and those are weird thoughts. They’re weird thoughts because this is the first time he’s actually felt it, the first time he’s been stuck knowing it’s over and there’s nothing he can do about it, so it’s the first time he’s _really_ almost died.

Everyone thinks he’s stupid (except Donkey Doug and Pillboi, but they’re stupid too, almost as stupid as him), and Jason’s starting to think they’re right, because the whip-its didn’t work and the snorkel didn’t work and he’s still trying to figure out why.

He’s a pretty good dancer, though. He’s not wrong about that. People have told him he’s bad at lots of things, but they’ve always told him he’s a good dancer, and a good choreographer even though he can only sometimes pronounce ‘choreographer’. So he can dance. He can do something.

Jason’s starting to wonder if this whole time he’s just been giving up over and over again, and he doesn’t want to do that anymore.

He wants to wake up.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] This Time I'm Coming Down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17933210) by [BabelGhoti (TheHandmadeTale)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHandmadeTale/pseuds/BabelGhoti)




End file.
